Preface to the Fourth Edition

In the five years since the last edition, the hacker culture this
dictionary describes has gone through some tremendous and largely positive
changes. Linux's breakthrough into the commercial mainstream following the
Mozilla release of early 1998 synergized with the continuing explosion of the
Internet to change many peoples' assumptions about us. Hacker culture isn't
just for hackers any more!

Previous editions of this book, as it turns out, played a subtle but not
unimportant role in this change. Your humble editor's experience with TNHD
helped develop the visibility and communications skills that he needed to take
a very public role in the mainstreaming of ‘open source’ and the
hacker culture. More directly, TNHD's admirers turned out to include a lot of
journalists and writers who were ready to hear the open-source story —
and ready to help tell it — because they liked what they had read
here.

The maturation of web search engines and tools like Google has put
powerful new tools in lexicographers' hands. We can now rapidly check for
live usage on the Web and Usenet. This has enabled us to flush a significant
number of dead terms and ringers (never-caught-on personal inventions that got
by our filters). This fourth edition, we believe, does a better job of
tracking actual live usage than any of its predecessors.

Here are some additions to the list of common and indicative terms given
in the Third Edition preface: